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Re-analysis confirms counselling as effective as CBT for depression
News from BACP

4 October 2018

There are no clinically meaningful differences between CBT and Counselling for patients presenting with depression.

This is the result of a re-analysis of the Pybis et al (2017) paper which compared the effectiveness of counselling and CBT for people with depression in IAPT services, utilising data from the National Audit of Psychological Therapies and found no clinically meaningful differences between CBT and Counselling for patients presenting with depression.

This re-analysis has been published as a response to a critique of the original paper, which didn’t consider patients who had received a low intensity CBT intervention prior to being stepped up to high intensity CBT or high intensity Counselling.

As in the original paper, this re-analysis reports no clinically meaningful differences between CBT and Counselling for patients presenting with depression.

The re-analysis has also found equivalent outcomes for CBT and Counselling in terms of reliable improvement for severe depression. The current NICE guidelines for depression do not recommend counselling for patients presenting with severe depression.

This new publication in BMC Psychiatry is authored by Professor Michael Barkham and Dr David Saxon from the University of Sheffield.